Is the Android Market down for you? (update: it's back)

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As I began the process of tearing into our brand new Droid X review unit, I ran through the nearly endless mental laundry list of all my favorite Android apps. “I’m totally going to install all of these“, I thought.

Only one problem: The Android Market wasn’t showing any apps. None. No Yammers, no Yelps, no Qiks, or Foursquares. Maybe it was just my demo unit, right? I grabbed a nearby Nexus One — same deal. HTC Evo? It.. worked. And then it didn’t. And then it did again.

We can’t nail down any rhyme or reason for the outage with the information currently available to us — so with that, we ask: is the Android Market working for you? If so (or if not), where are you located? What handset are you running? Let us know in the comments below, and lets see if we can’t figure this out.

Given how random the issue seems to be, I can only assume it’s an issue with a handful of Android Market’s distributed servers. On operations of this scale, the serving job is generally spread across dozens to hundreds of (theoretically identical) boxes. Each time a user connects, they’re automatically sent to whichever mirrored box has a sufficiently light workload. If one (or two, or half, whatever) of these boxes is broken while others aren’t, the behavior will seem entirely random to the end user.